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The chapter considers three poems composed by Afro-Cuban poet Marcelino Arozarena, “La comparsa del majá,” “La conga,” and “Carnaval de Santiago.” In this discussion of these poems, the chapter argues that through their widely varying depictions of traditional Afro-Cuban carnival celebrations, each serves as an emblematic example of what we might refer to as the three dimensions of Arozarena's poetic production.

Focusing on the representations of carnival and its comparsas (carnival bands and music), this book offers new readings of poems by seminal Cuban poets, examining how their poetic work illustrating these traditions both contributed to and detracted from the growth of a tangible Afro-Cuban identity. All of these poems relate in some way or the other to the cultural and intellectual phenomenon known as Afrocubanismo. This phenomenon thrived in Havana, initiating in the late 1920s. The book examines, from a literary perspective, the long-running debate between the proponents of Afro-Cuban cultural manifestations and the predominantly white Cuban intelligentsia, who viewed these traditions as “backward” and counter to the interests of the young Republic.

This chapter considers the influence of the writings of José Martí—poet, journalist, pedagogue, and revolutionary father of the Cuban nation. Martí's pro-independence writings engendered a uniquely permeable Cuban politics of childhood in which a Rousseauian belief in the innate virtue of children and a Lockean notion of the child as tabula coexisted in dynamic tension with repeatedly frustrated efforts to establish honest, effective, and egalitarian government on the island. This tension would be exacerbated by growing U.S. hegemony in Cuba after the end of the war in 1898, driven by the North American belief that Cubans' racial inferiority and political immaturity left them ill-equipped for independence.

This chapter features a comparative analysis of Cántico de la huella, an erotic elegy by Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, and of Rolando Estévez’s interpretation of the poem in his book design, which included a cover of two lovers perched in a tree face to face. Díaz discusses the literary and artistic traditions that coalesce mind and body as an impression of quantum spacetime, the eternal present of the poetic voice, while she explores the way Estévez captures the essence of the poem and symbolically enhances its sensual quality.